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Bodyguards and Assassins

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Bodyguards and Assassins

Help

Fantasia provides links to the most popular calendaring tools. You will need separate accounts with these services to use their calendars or your own desktop calendaring software. Fantasia cannot remotely update these events once you have added them to your calendar. To keep up to date with changes to the schedule — please subscribe to the Fantasia RSS, check our Blog or our follow us on our Twitter account.

Description

At the dawn of the 20th century, Hong Kong is a British colony and China is ruled by the haughty Qing Dynasty. A wind of defiance is blowing across the land and at the heart of it is Sun Yat-Sen, who history now remembers at the “father of the Nation,” the founder of the Chinese republic. Not all share his vision of a modern China liberated from the clutches of a decaying Imperial court and foreign interlopers. Chen Xiao-Bai, a militant revolutionary thinker, pleads with printing magnate Li Yu-Tang for support. Li is initially uninterested, and moreover discourages his son Chung-Guang from getting involved. This changes, however, when Li’s friends start turning up murdered and Chen is kidnapped by the vicious agents of the reactionary Yan Xiao-Guo. Li’s change of heart is a dramatic one, as he rallies the riffraff of Hong Kong’s alleyways and market stalls, the menial labourers, vegetable hawkers and rickshaw pullers, to take a stand and protect Sun at his most vulnerable moment. Sun’s arrival draws near and so does the clash between the regular folks of Hong Kong’s streets and the Yan’s band of murderers. The next few pages of China’s history will be written in blood.

Ten years in the making, Teddy Chen’s masterful historical fight flick BODYGUARDS AND ASSASSINS, which swept this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards, isn’t merely a dynamic blend of epic politics, weighty and exciting martial arts, set in a vividly recreated Hong Kong of a century ago. It’s also a gallery of many of China’s outstanding cinematic stars. Award-winning Wang Xueqi, who plays Li, is a familiar face to fans of admired directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou; Tony Leung Ka-Fai, who plays Chen, is a fixture since sharing the screen with Chow Yun-Fat in the ’80s and early ’90s. Also on board are such hot young stars as Nicholas Tse, Fan Bingbing and pop singer Leon Lai, never to mention longstanding icons like Simon Yam, the lovable Eric Tsang and of course martial arts master Donnie Yen. The ensemble cast here delivers the goods in an adventure that builds in tension and complexity through its first half, and devotes its entire second act to a pulse-pounding extended street battle for the future of a nation!